The Swiss Pirate Party is making inroads into politics in the country famous for having a gun in every closet, and Nazi gold in its banks, as the party's Alex Arnold has been elected mayor of Eichberg.

Thomas Bruderer, president of the Pirate Party Switzerland, is delighted saying that this result for the young party is an important milestone. “To win a majority vote shows that our members are not just a marginal phenomenon; but are in the midst of society,” he said.

While he might be right, we do not think the film and music industry is quaking in its boots yet. Eichberg is a small rural town with a population of 1,481, with ten per cent of them being foreigners.

The Mayor is a part-time position but he should be pleased that he defeated two candidates from the Swiss People's Party.

A former Swiss private banker is going to hand over data on hundreds of offshore bank account holders to the WikiLeaks website today.

Rudolf Elmer once headed the office of Julius Baer in the Cayman Islands until he was fired by the bank in 2002. He is going to go on trail in Switzerland for breaching bank secrecy.

Wikileaks is going to get two CDs which will contain names and account information of around 2000 individuals who have parked money offshore. Yesterday it was hoped that Julian Assange would be there to pick up the CD, but it is not clear if that would be a breach of probation.

Elmer said that WikiLeaks was his last hope as he couldn't get my message out. Blum, Elmer's lawyer, told Reuters: "The story is really about banks and banking, about bank secrecy and the damage it does to society when it's employed to hide tax evasion, money laundering and corruption."

Elmer told the Swiss newspaper Der Sonntag that the data involved multimillionaires, international companies and hedge funds from countries including the United States, Germany and Britain.

A Swiss Court has ordered a P2P snooping business Logistep AG, to stop gathering even publicly available information. Logistep has operated in Switzerland since 2004, and has been trolling BitTorrent sites for movies, music, or software, then connecting to swarms and logging the information.

The idea is that content providers can take this information and submit it to local courts, seeking to identify and then sue individual file-swappers. Switzerland, is not an EU member, and has decided that Logistep's methods are wrong.

The country's Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, Hanspeter Thür, took Logistep to court. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that IP addresses are in fact personal information and that companies like Logistep can't go about slurping them up for mere civil cases like file-swapping lawsuits.

Thür said that only the state can violate personal privacy, and only when pursuing criminal cases.